Business Week’s Jane Black makes a good case for the short comings of the telecom regulations. Good overview piece.

bq. The rush to lump VOIP in with phone services obscures the larger problem: The 100-year-old regulatory structure for telephones is no longer adequate for today’s advanced telecom services. These rules were written in a time when each technology delivered one type of service: Voice traveled over copper wires. Broadcast radio and TV signals flew through the air. Multichannel video journeyed across a coaxial cable.

Black’s over reliance on folks from the VoIP campe (like they don’t have a vested interest) takes away a bit of credibility. Still, Vint Cerf, the so-called father of the Internet makes a spirited argument.

bq. “To single out VOIP as a telephone service is a terrible misunderstanding of the Internet industry. I would submit that, someday, the phrase Internet telephony will sound as archaic as ‘horseless carriage’ sounds today,” says Vint Cerf, one of the designers of the Internet protocol and vice-president for technology and Internet architecture at MCI.